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Leonard Nimoy

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Funny thing about the K-7 was the scale of the miniature Enterprise included with the kit. It was woefully out of scale, so it appears AMT simply looked at a clip of the 1701 in the background of the K-7 exterior, and assumed it was that small.

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"...to be like God, you have the power to make the world anything you want it to be."

I think several ancillary sources have given specs on the size of K-7 compared to a Constitution class vessel. I will try to dig that up, but i'm almost certain the 1701 was not as small as the model included in the K-7 kit. That would make the K-7 as massive as the Death Star (in relation to a Star Destroyer), when the only TOS vehicles known to be that large were Balok's ship and the "planet killer" from "The Doomsday Machine."

__________________
"...to be like God, you have the power to make the world anything you want it to be."

I'm pretty sure you're right about the C or D cell batteries. I don't remember which though. It was nearly 50 years ago.

No, it was definitely two AA batteries. If you happen to have an unassembled kit and some C or D batteries lying around, try and see if they fit. (They don't.)

Okay, thanks guys.

Just out of curiosity, are the 2 AA batteries arranged side by side or are they arranged front to back, like 2 batteries inside a cylinder shaped flashlight, in the lower half of the secondary hull of the Enterprise model kit? The reason I ask is because I have memory of 2 "C" or "D" size batteries being arranged front to back (like in a flashlight) in the lower half of the secondary hull of the Enterprise model kit for some strange reason.

They were double A's and they were put in sequentially (as in a flashlight). The closest thing to a scale match for the K-7 was the Ent from the 3 piece TOS set with the Ent, D-7, and ROM BOP. (Personally, I display mine with both Ent and D-7 Jonny Lightning ships.)

Hmm, let's get a baseline. Assume an average tribble is a sphere with a radius of 5 cm, therefore a volume of 0.00052 m^3. The most efficient packing of spheres takes up 74% of available volume, so let's multiply that by 4/3 and call it 0.0007 m^3. So 1,771,561 tribbles -- three days' worth of reproduction -- would take up a volume of only 1236.8 cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 10.73 meters on a side -- or maybe about half the residential volume of the 15-unit apartment block where I live. Even a small K-7 could hold a lot more tribbles than that.

So how big is the Death Star? Estimates of the first one's diameter range from 120 to 140 km, which makes for a lot of variation in the volume estimates. But taking a roughly midrange value, the volume would be somewhere around 10^15 m^3. Therefore it could hold around 1.4 x 10^18 or 1.4 quintillion tribbles. (That's 1.4 billion billion.) Of course, realistically the tribbles would run out of food and starve to death long before they reached that number.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors

According to www.ex-astris-scientia.org, the K-7 is 450m and the Constitution Class ships are 289m. This confirms how out of scale the K-7 kit's 1701 was. It makes me wonder if AMT was hoping for a literal recreation of the scene as one would see it in "The Trouble with Tribbles," where the 1701 seems that small in the background.

The 6-inch long Enterprise as part of AMT's mid-70's Space Ship Set would have been a better scale fit for the K-7. I wonder of anyone ever tried to match the kits back in the day.

__________________
"...to be like God, you have the power to make the world anything you want it to be."

EDIT: Okay, I tracked it down myself, and it says, "The diameter of 450m is based on a very rough comparison with the USS Enterprise and the small shuttle model in the shuttlebay of Greg Jein's reconstruction of K-7 for DS9: 'Trials and Tribble-ations'." So it's only approximate, although I guess it does get you within the ballpark.

__________________Christopher L. Bennett Homepage -- Site update 11/16/14 including annotations for "The Caress of a Butterfly's Wing" and overview for DTI: The Collectors